My apologies for the lack of updates. Life has been busy for my wife and me as we have been purchasing our first home. My job is going great, and there’s a lot of responsibility there with leading a large group of researchers and students.

I plan to get back to work on writing. Actually, an email from a fan named James started me back up into the editing process for the 57k words currently in Shadows of Our Fathers (feel free to thank James :D). In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting the first three chapters of the draft, as they become “ready”, and you can feel free to comment on them. Believe it or not, I take comments very seriously. I’m still learning my craft, and suggestions I find on Goodreads, Amazon, and other places often find their way into me honing my skills. For this reason, Book 3 of the Primal Patterns is going to be different–as are the other two books I’ve started for the Winter Phenomenon series and the book tentatively titled Our Criminal Future.

Why different? Well, it’s been pretty obvious that the way I had been going about writing was flawed. Even after paying for deep story edits of my book, Lucifer’s Odyssey was fatally flawed by lack of description, internal thought processes, and direction that held back and ultimately thwarted readers from being engaged in the series. The reviews and comments on sites like Goodreads, Amazon, and other places bear this out. The upvoted Amazon reviews that every reader sees (and ultimately result in fewer people purchasing the book or entering the series) have killed almost any chance of the series gaining traction, and the premise of the series (an alternate history of Lucifer and Jehovah) was perhaps too controversial to even be attempted in a first book, before any reader could trust me to deliver a good story. And the truth is that I probably wasn’t ready, as a writer, to bring that story the light it deserved and needed in order for it to have a chance to become more popular. I have zero friends who have finished the book (even friends who loved Zelazny and sci-fi). Even my wife can’t complete the first book. And this means that there has been no one I could really trust to help me become a better writer, so that I can write this kind of epic story properly.

So, I put down Shadows of Our Fathers and focused on other stories. Some of the shorter stories like Elves and Goblins: Perspectives of a Father’s Rebellion were not only attempts to highlight social issues like segregation and universal healthcare, but they were also my attempts at applying what I had learned from comments on Lucifer’s Odyssey, The Goblin Rebellion, and Angels and Demons. Other stories like the one in the Pride Collection were more emotion, expression, description and an attempt at a more understandable story that might reach audiences better. This continued into Hallow’s Ween to try to connect with readers better–though at this point, all of them have stalled as far as sales. But despite these setbacks, I appreciate the comments and harsh words because they help me realize that what I’m doing right now is not good enough. For those who have enjoyed the work I’ve done so far, don’t worry. I’ll keep working at it. I enjoy writing too much to ultimately quit it. My other career requires a lot of technical writing and that has been it’s own reward, but fiction is something I’m very passionate about. I love story telling. I just know that I’m not where I need to be in my fiction-writing ability.

The downside of that rationale is that I realize I have done readers somewhat of a disservice by putting out Lucifer’s Odyssey and The Goblin Rebellion before they were ultimately finished–before my skills as an author had been honed properly. The thousands of dollars I had put into editing and artwork were not enough to save those inadequacies and that’s a truly sobering thought–that no one, even someone who specializes in fixing authors, can save the work but myself at this point. Which means that, ultimately, I will probably have to redo most of Lucifer’s Odyssey or simply move on to other projects. The compromise at this point is to complete at least the first trilogy of the Primal Patterns to give readers some closure.

Of all the stages of the writing process, editing is by far the most arduous. You’ve put your ideas out on a medium, and like taking an idea out of Plato’s Forms, the implementation is flawed because you, the instrument, are flawed. And because you are the instrument of that realization of the idea, you are hopelessly inept at seeing and fixing the flaws. You almost have to have another expert come by and fix your instrument–the mechanism for which you bring idea to reality–or, and more likely in my case, you have to learn how to fix your own process of realization.

Anyway, I’m back to editing right now. The next step will be continuing the story of the Primal Patterns, closing up the trilogy, and moving on to a different story–hopefully one that has some chance of reaching a broader audience.

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I’ve pushed the official release of The Goblin Rebellion to March 14th, but that’s basically a worst-case scenario. I released The Goblin Rebellion to Beta Readers on Friday. I’m hoping they get the copies back to me with comments by the end of this week. If they do, I may be able to release The Goblin Rebellion to the general public very soon.

In the mean time, feel free to read my new novelette “Elves and Goblins: Perspectives of a Father’s Rebellion” for 1.99, exclusively at Amazon, which has gotten very positive feedback from readers.

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I’m striking out the reader’s name, but I have a feeling many people have similar questions and thoughts, so I wanted to share my thoughts with others on these topics. If you have a question for me (even if it’s insulting or filled with disappointment), feel free to contact me at rexjameson at gmail.com, where at is an @ symbol. I love hearing from you guys and gals, and I appreciate your opinions and viewpoints–even if they’re quite contrary to mine.

> I thought that Michael and Gabriel are good guys.

They are good guys, if you’re on their side. However, the Old Testament is not exactly a children’s story, and the side we’re on is pretty brutal. As the oldest child of my family, I’m hoping I’m not a descendant of a Philistine. Things never go well for the first born Philistines and Egyptians :). In fact, the more innocent you are in the Old Testament, the more likely you’re going to be murdered.

Take the story of Samson, for instance. Samson seeks to marry a Philistine because “it is of the Lord”. He kills a lion, and bees make honey inside of the carcass. So, approaching his wedding day, he goes into the wedding feast and proposes a riddle to his Philistine groomsmen. Being a humble man, he chooses a riddle about himself–concerning the lion he killed and the bee tenants–and promises them 30 pieces of fine garments that he doesn’t have if they get it right. They don’t guess it and badger Samson’s fiancee to give them the answer. She does, and Samson decides that the best part of the riddle is yet to come.

He goes into the streets of Ashkelon and kills 30 innocent people, collects their garments and delivers the fabrics to his groomsmen. Joke’s on them, right? Samson refuses to marry the woman and leaves. The woman’s father gives her to the best man who is still interested. Samson changes his mind because maybe he has another riddle to give to the groomsmen or something, and comes back, but the father informs him that his daughter is now engaged because Samson refused her. He actually offers his younger daughter, but Samson’s having none of that.

Samson does the only logical thing available. He attaches torches to the tails of 300 foxes and sends them into the Philistine fields and cities, burning down innocent people’s farms and homes. The people get so infuriated that instead of killing Samson, they trap the woman and her father in their house and burn it down. In revenge for someone else killing the father and the wife he should have had, Samson goes about killing a whole bunch more Philistines.

The Philistines finally go “OK, we’re sending an army to bring this guy to justice for killing so many innocent people,” but unfortunately for them, God puts a magic, non-brittle ass’s jawbone on the ground, and Samson uses it to beat 1,000 Philistines to death with it.

I won’t go into the story of Delilah, but the good news is that Delilah doesn’t appear to get punished for betraying her husband. Samson just gets a chance to kill more Philistines at a temple.

Not exactly a happy ending for the Philistines. I’d argue that none of the Old Testament is a happy ending unless you’re one of God’s chosen people. Michael and Gabriel (and angels in general) are more often than not involved in slaughter and retribution against the people outside of God’s chosen. The perspective of much of the Primal Patterns series is from outside of God’s chosen, and so, it’s not much of a happy ending for some of the protagonists, and that’s perfectly OK if you’re in God’s chosen. God gets even more smitey as the series progresses.

> Have fun writing and write a book soon about light, love, good folks and > happy endings. I need happy endings.

If you’re a fan of the New Testament, there’s a happier ending that comes by the end of Book 3: Shadows of our Fathers. (redacted) That’s a spoiler obviously, but this is a retelling of much of the Old Testament that takes into account the breadth of God’s creation–namely the billions of trillions of stars and 350 billion known galaxies and 7 trillion dwarf galaxies. God’s chosen is expanded drastically in this series.

Both of these have good guys ultimately thwarting evil, but the path is not as black and white as you’ll like. In Angels and Demons, God wants to show the Devil how good mankind is so he agrees to a wager with the Devil that humans who are murdered go to Hell and those who die of natural causes go to Heaven. If mankind follows the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) and the teachings of the New Testament (forgiveness of an enemy, etc.), then Heaven wins by default. War and murder will obviously cause the Devil to gain the only power he has available–that of numbers of souls, and mankind’s tendency to kill causes Michael and Gabriel (those good guys) to have to try to convince humanity to stop killing.

In Elves and Goblins, a marginalized people (the elves) have been placed in concentration camps by goblins and are being starved to death. They can’t go to universities or receive health care, and over 300 years, they nearly die out. A father faces the imminent death of his son and decides that the only recourse is to go into town and find a cure for his son’s illness, a disease that is decimating the remaining elves. He has to kill for the first time in hundreds of years, but he’s doing so to save his innocent son.

To me, these are happy endings, but happy endings don’t come free. People have to work for happiness, and the path to redemption is often paved in tragedy and loss for the greater good.

So, to wrap up, I do believe in happy endings, but my happy endings are not the neat and tidy ones that many readers are desperately searching for. That’s OK. No book can please everyone. If you’re looking for recommendations of books that are much happier and generally death free, authors like Debora Geary may be more down your alley. Of course, she’s writing about happy witches and not angels and demons. The good news is that after the third book in the Primal Patterns series, I plan on tackling a different subject. Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely to be about happy witches.

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So, I got around to uploading Angels and Demons: Perspectives of a Violent Afterlife earlier this week, and I had been waiting for Amazon to price match it, but that may take forever. Instead, I’ll just go ahead and blast it out and hope people don’t mind going to Smashwords to pick up the free version.

The free version is likely to be up until at least a couple of months, so feel free to snag it to sample my work.

Heaven and hell are vying for human souls in vortices between humanity and the afterlife. When Lucifer and his demons overwhelm Archangel Michael and Gabriel, heaven is faced with the possibility of losing all souls on the planet.

Reincarnated in heaven, Michael must fight his way back to Earth to stop more demons from swarming the planet and help his brother Gabriel track down the devil before he tricks humanity into harvesting billions of souls into his fiery kingdom.